"Every Home Is Wired": 1 -- Endnotes

If you followed a link from the thesis text, the yellow arrows will lead you back to the bite you came from.

5	Frith writes that "the local is now equated with the different ... in terms of a position in the global market- place. ... To support local venues (whether in Norwich or Nijmegen), local distributors (whether in Scotland or Victoria) and local radio stations (whether in Dominica or Finland) is to support not just one's own local music, but also 'local' music in general, 'different' music wherever it comes from" ("Popular Music" 23).
6	Talbott disagrees with this view, however: "one of the Net's attractions is avowedly its natural susceptibility to being shivered into innumerable, separate, relatively homogenous groups. The fact that you can find a forum for virtually any topic you might be interested in, however obscure, implies fragmentation as its reverse side. There may be advantages to this 'principle of infinite cleaving,' but the cultivation of community is not one of them" (75). It is immediately evident, though, that his criticism arises out of a traditional view that equates 'community' with society as such. In our new, global environment, however, this view of society, linked as it is to the concept of the nation as a unified whole, is becoming increasingly meaningless, as we have seen, since nations themselves are more and more revealed as artificial constructs. With a more 'local' concept of 'community', then, it is very clear that the fragment groups (potentially of considerable size) can in fact very well cultivate a vital community among their members.

Section 1 Endnotes -- Go on to Bite:

© 1998 Axel Bruns